Brick raises USD 8.5 mln to build a single API layer for Open Finance in Southeast Asia

Other investors in the round include Trihill Capital, existing investors - Better Tomorrow Ventures and Rally Cap Ventures, and notable fintech operators including Sima Gandhi (Plaid, Creative Juice), Yan Wu (Bond), Brian Ma (Divvy Homes), Ooi Hsu Ken (Iterative), Amrish Rau (Pine Labs), and Andrea Baronchelli (Aspire) also participated. The fundraising supports Brick’s vision of powering the next generation of fintech companies with easy to implement, cost-effective, and inclusive fintech infrastructure, the official press release states.

Brick was founded in 2020; the company builds Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for fintech and consumer tech companies. These APIs make it easy for popular fintech platforms to offer payment, credit, investment, and insurance products to their consumers by connecting those platforms with hyper-local data sources. For example, if a user wants to take out a loan, Brick’s technology can connect the platform with the user’s financial account, or gather mobile wallet or employment data to help process the loan application. 

This technology automates and integrates the process of collecting data from different sources to facilitate financial transactions. That means fintech platforms can quickly offer their users a wide range of tailored financial products - and improves access to finance at a time of accelerating digital adoption across Indonesia and Southeast Asia. 

Brick works with thousands of developers in the country and has signed up more than 50 paying clients. These include some of Indonesia’s fastest-growing Indonesian fintechs and conglomerates like Sinarmas Group and Astra Financial. The company supports more than 13 million API calls and almost 1 million consumers each month. 

Over the last six months, Brick has expanded on its API suite to better serve technology companies in Indonesia. In addition to its Brick Data API, the company now offers Brick Verification and Brick Payments. This allows the Brick API suite to cover deeper use cases and enables developers to launch world-class products with a single API integration. For example, the end-to-end user journey of onboarding, underwriting, and disbursement for a user who wants to take out a loan, can now be automated with Brick Verification, Brick Data, and Brick Payments respectively.

While currently focused on Indonesia, the biggest Southeast Asian economy, Brick plans to cover the whole region, starting with expansion into Singapore and the Philippines later in 2022.